Down with Big Brother (50 page)

More chants of “Freedom, freedom!” and “Long live Dubĉek.” The long, narrow square echoed with the sound of people jangling key chains, their way of telling Dubĉek’s Stalinist successors that the time had come to quit.

For more than two decades Czechoslovakia’s hard-line Stalinist regime had done its best to turn Dubĉek into a nonperson. When the state-controlled news media deigned to mention him at all, it was only to ridicule him. After being forced to resign as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in April 1969, he had been given a series of low-level jobs, each one more degrading than the last. For most of his countrymen, Dubĉek’s weary face evoked a bygone age. On his way over to Wenceslas Square, people had stared at him in amazement as if they had seen a ghost.

Yet here he was, basking in the applause of hundreds of thousands of people. Around the country virtually the entire population of Czechoslovakia was watching the scene on live television. Dubĉek’s return to Wenceslas Square and the fact that it was witnessed by so many people represented “the triumph of remembering over forgetting,” in the phrase of the exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera.

Wenceslas Square, in the heart of Prague, had been the focal point of popular resistance to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. For a long time the stone facade of the National Museum at the top of the square had borne the pockmarks of machine-gun fire, following a shoot-out between a Czech sniper and Soviet soldiers. Here Soviet troops had shot dead an eleven-year-old boy as he tried to ram a Czechoslovak flag down the barrel of a Red Army tank. Here, on January 16, 1969, a Czech student named Jan Palach had burned himself to death in a protest against the abandonment of the ideals of the Prague Spring. In retrospect, Palach’s death marked the last spasm of the democracy movement. Palach too had become a nonperson.

After Dubĉek’s ouster from office, power had passed to a group of neo-Stalinists led by the Slovak leader Gustáv Husák. “Normalization” became the slogan of the day. Within a few years half a million Dubĉek supporters had been expelled from the Communist Party. Those who refused to recant were forced to take menial jobs as street sweepers, boiler men, and night watchmen. Tight censorship of the news media was reimposed. Independent political groups and trade unions were shut down. Czechoslovakia closed its borders with the outside world once more.

The country remained a reactionary backwater long after Gorbachev had unleashed his glasnost campaign in the Soviet Union. For Husák and his colleagues, glasnost represented a mortal political threat. Their power derived directly from the Soviet invasion. They knew very well that a public discussion of the invasion would fatally undermine their own legitimacy. During meetings with Soviet leaders in 1989 they repeatedly rejected attempts to reopen the question. Anything associated with the Prague Spring, including use of the very word “reform,” was taboo. Like Honecker in East Germany, the Czech leaders resisted pressure from Moscow for the adoption of more liberal policies, believing it would trigger a political avalanche that would sweep them from office.

“They lived under the shadow of the 1968 syndrome,” Gorbachev wrote later. “They would become hysterical at the slightest hint in the Soviet press about the possibility of an official reevaluation of 1968.”
⁹¹

The implementation of “normalization” was so thorough and so pervasive
that it effectively ended political debate in Czechoslovakia. For years organized resistance to the regime had been confined to a handful of restless intellectuals, the most prominent of whom was Václav Havel, the country’s leading playwright. Most people were too scared to side openly with the dissidents. The memory of the invasion and the massive political repression that followed discouraged them from expressing their true opinions. As Havel himself said in 1988, “our fellow countrymen sympathize with us, but they do not support us.”
⁹²

As anti-Communist rebellions swept through the rest of Eastern Europe, the hard-line Czechoslovak leadership found itself politically and ideologically isolated. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it was clear to everybody that Czechoslovakia was next in line. All that was needed was some spark to galvanize the dormant and apathetic masses into action and help them overcome their fear of the regime. That spark occurred on Friday, November 17, after the government had used force to break up a peaceful student demonstration demanding political freedom. Hundreds of demonstrators were taken to the hospital, and there were rumors (which later turned out to be false) that a student had been beaten to death.

Over the next week the protests grew until they came to envelop the whole country. Havel and his dissident friends launched a mass movement, known as Civic Forum, to investigate police brutality and demand the resignations of those responsible. Civic Forum’s targets included Husák, who had been kicked upstairs to become president, and his successor as the Communist Party leader, Miloš Jakeš. Day by day more and more people packed into Wenceslas Square to support Civic Forum’s demands.

As fear melted away, the people of Prague took a perverse delight in flaunting forbidden symbols, as if to make clear to the regime that the attempt to wipe out the country’s collective memory had failed utterly. By November 24 the streets of the city were plastered with portraits of Palach and Dubĉek. There were also numerous pictures of Tomaš Masaryk, the social democrat who had presided over the birth of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1919, and his son, Jan, who had served as foreign minister after World War II and been hounded to his death by the Communists. As symbols of the country’s liberal, pre-Communist traditions, the two Masaryks had been consigned to the political void along with Palach, Dubĉek, and Havel. Another nonperson who reemerged into public life on November 24 was Marta Kubisova, an actress banned from the stage for twenty-one years for performing anti-Communist songs. The crowd roared its approval as she stepped onto the balcony of the newspaper
Free Word
to
sing a haunting song about a seventeenth-century Bohemian hero who fought for the liberation of his people.

Then it was Dubĉek’s turn. There were delirious cheers when he demanded the ouster of all Communist Party leaders tied to the Soviet invasion. “Twenty years ago we tried to reform socialism, to make it better,” Dubĉek told the crowd. “In those days the army and the police stood with the people, and I am sure it will be the same again today.”

“
Dubĉek na hrad, Dubĉek na hrad,
” chanted the crowd. “Dubĉek to the castle.” In other words, Dubĉek for president. (Hrad?any Castle was the official residence of the head of state, Gustáv Husák.)

Dubĉek was followed out onto the balcony by Havel. They stood for a moment together under the television arc lights, holding each other’s arms and acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. They were an odd couple, the former Communist Party leader in a gray suit alongside the dissident in his scruffy jeans and open-neck shirt. To the crowd down below, it seemed like the most natural union in the world. “Dubĉek-Havel,” they chanted. The revolutions of 1968 and 1989 had finally come together.

H
AVEL AND
D
UBĈEK HAD REACHED
Wenceslas Square by very different routes. By personality and background, they were almost polar opposites. They represented two distinct political traditions, but in the end they arrived at the same point.

Dubĉek was the son of a Slovak carpenter, who had emigrated briefly to the United States, only to return home thoroughly disillusioned with capitalism. One of the founders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Dubĉek’s father took his family to live in the Soviet Union for thirteen years, at the height of Stalin’s terror. During World War II both Dubĉek and his brother, Julius, fought with the Slovak partisans against the Nazis; Julius was killed during one of these battles. Such impeccable Communist credentials gave Dubĉek a head start as he began his climb up the party’s bureaucratic ladder at the end of the war.
⁹³

Havel, by contrast, was the son of a rich Czech businessman. His uncle owned Czechoslovakia’s biggest film studios. After the Communists staged their coup d’état in 1948, the Havel family assets were seized by the state. Havel himself was prevented from entering the university because of his class origins. Instead he became a stagehand at a theater and eventually a playwright. He took a special delight in satirizing the absurdities of communism.

The two political traditions came together briefly in 1968, when Dubĉek set out to prove that communism need not be synonymous with dictatorship. The Action Program drawn up by the reformers in the Czech leadership was to find an echo many years later in the ideas of perestroika. It promised a return to the rule of law as well as respect for freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. The grotesque personality cult that had traditionally surrounded Communist Party leaders was dismantled. Many years later a Czech dissident recalled how impressed he had been when a newspaper published a picture of Dubĉek diving into a swimming pool. “We had never seen a picture of a Communist Party first secretary in bathing trunks before,” said Peter Uhl, editor of an underground human rights journal.
⁹⁴
Havel described the Prague Spring as “an unbelievable dream.” It was the first time in his life he had really felt free.

Although Dubĉek rebelled against the Stalinist variant of communism, he remained loyal to both socialism and the Soviet Union. The climactic moment in his political career came in the early-morning hours of August 21, 1968, when he learned that Soviet troops had landed in Prague. His first reaction was incredulity: How could the Soviet leaders do such a thing “
to me”?
⁹⁵
As he later acknowledged in his autobiography, he had totally misjudged the character of the people he was dealing with. “I did not believe the Soviet leaders would launch a military attack on us.… It took the drastic, practical experience of the coming days and months for me to understand that I was in fact dealing with gangsters.”
⁹⁶

Shortly afterward Soviet paratroopers burst through the doors of Dubĉek’s office and announced they were taking the Czechoslovak leadership “into custody.” Dubĉek and his fellow Politburo members were flown to Moscow under armed guard. During the subsequent “negotiations” with Brezhnev, Dubĉek maintained a dignified silence, refusing to recant the humanistic ideals of the Prague Spring. At the same time, he chose to avoid a public confrontation with Brezhnev or the hard-liners in the Czechoslovak leadership, such as Husák. His position was close to that of the character in Havel’s play
The Memorandum
, who hopes he can “salvage this and that” if only he can sidestep an “open conflict” with his ruthless deputy. The attempt to save what could be saved ended in total failure and Dubĉek’s expulsion from the Communist Party.

During the deadening years of normalization Dubĉek was kept under de facto house arrest. Police surveillance was relaxed after Gorbachev visited Prague in April 1987 and signaled his support for some of the ideas of the Prague Spring. Even then Dubĉek preferred to keep his head down. When
I called on him at his home in Bratislava in August 1988, on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion, he chatted amicably about his three grandchildren and his hopes of visiting Italy. But he refused to respond to a harsh attack that had just been published in the Communist Party newspaper
Rude Pravo
, accusing him of “personal responsibility” for the invasion because of his failure to rein in “the extremists.” “It’s not that I am afraid, simply that the time is not right,” he explained.
⁹⁷

There could scarcely have been a greater contrast with Havel, who believed that the only way of dealing with a lawless regime was to confront it head-on. Like the founders of Solidarity in Poland, Havel was determined to follow his conscience whatever the consequences. He talked about “living in truth.” By behaving as a free citizen in an unfree nation, he would show his countrymen that it was possible to challenge the seemingly all-powerful regime. Over time, he believed, more and more people would join the ranks of the opposition, as the absurdities of the Communist system became apparent.

The first cracks in the Communist monolith appeared in 1977, when Havel and a handful of other dissidents published a document drawing attention to human rights violations in Czechoslovakia. The idea behind Charter ’77, according to Havel, was to provide society with a voice, “to straighten up as a human being once more after being humiliated, gagged, lied to, and manipulated.” The fact that the charter initially attracted only a few hundred signatories was unimportant. What mattered was that civil society, which had previously been given up for dead, was once again showing signs of life. The charter became the inspiration for Civic Forum.

These activities earned Havel the hatred of the regime and the status of public enemy number one. His plays were performed in New York, London, eventually even Warsaw and Moscow—but not in Prague. He had spent more than five years in prison and had been arrested countless times, most recently in January 1989, for commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Palach’s self-immolation. When not in prison, he was the subject of almost constant police harassment and surveillance.

Havel’s defiance had its roots in an intellectual tradition stretching back more than three centuries. In 1620 the Habsburg armies crushed the forces of the Czech nobility at the Battle of the White Mountain. Twenty-seven ringleaders of an attempted uprising were publicly executed in Prague’s Old Town Square. For the next three hundred years, until Czechoslovakia won recognition as an independent state after World War I, Prague was a provincial outpost. Czechs were excluded from the political life of the empire, and
the official language, in Prague as in Vienna, was German. The role of preserving and defending the Czech language and national consciousness fell to the writers.